75% of Earth's Land is Degraded

As of right now, 75% of Earth's land has been polluted, become deserts, or have been deforested for the development of agricultural lands. If the Earth's land is continued to be used in this way, 95% of the land will be degraded by the year 2050. The land degradation will eventually force millions of people to move because the land will no longer be able to produce food. Replanting native species in areas that have been degraded is one way to reverse the trends of degradation. I think it is very important that we help the areas that are degraded the best we can. If we do not help fix the degraded areas we can have serious problems and the land degradation can affect millions of people.


National Geographic Article

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The GM chickens that lay eggs with anti-cancer drugs

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46993649 Researchers have genetically modified chickens to lay eggs that contain health promoting drugs that can help arthritis and cancer. The drugs are said to be 100 times cheaper to produce when they are laid than when they are produced in a factory. These researchers hope that they can produce the drugs in commercial quantities. The chickens aren't harmed and they just think that they are laying normal eggs. It only takes three eggs to produce enough dosage of the drug and chickens lay about 300 per year. The researchers hope that they can use the chicken drug to promote animal health too.
Read more

Climate change models predicted ocean currents would speed up - but not this soon

Within the past two decades ocean currents have been speeding up at a fast rate because of climate change. It was predicted that ocean currents would speed up, but not this quickly. Since this was not expected, people are worried that climate change could have many other effects that we are not prepared for. Global ocean circulation has accelerated by 36 percent since the early 1990's. Our oceans have a huge impact on the planet and the different effects of climate change will change our planet for the worse. It is scary that scientists have underestimated the effects of climate change and it shows how little time we have to work on this issue. Everybody needs to understand that we are facing a huge problem and if we don't all start to act on it then there is not much hope for a good future. I hope that the future planned research goes well and scientists can learn more about the unknowns. link
Read more

Urban Coyote Evolution Favors The Bold

Image
linky Summary Coyotes are becoming an increasing risk in urban areas. They are coming into contact with people and pets more and more as time goes on. Researchers decided to find out what is making coyotes so comfortable around humans and how to prevent these interactions. They are led to believe that it begins with the parenting. They believe the fearlessness is passed down from parent to offspring.  They went to a wildlife conservatory in Utah to observe the captive, but mostly wild, coyotes that reside there. When the keepers feed them, they usually made as little contact with the coyotes as possible, to limit the human interaction. However, when they started staying after they fed them, the coyotes became more comfortable with the human presence. After generations, the coyotes had no fear whatsoever towards the humans. They became bolder with each passing generation. This reveals that as humans, to prevent exposure to these predators, we need to make our yards as uni...
Read more